Mariquita: A Novel. Ayscough John
of purity, rarely noble and fine. That she was book-ignorant he knew, as well as that she was life-ignorant; but he did not think her intellectually narrow, even intellectually fallow. Along what roads her mind moved he could not, by mere study of her, discover; yet he was sure it did not stagnate without motion or life.
About a month after the arrival of Sarella, one Saturday night at supper, that young person observed that Mr. Gore's place was vacant.
Mariquita must equally have noted the fact, but she had said nothing.
"Isn't Mr. Gore coming to his supper?" Sarella asked her.
Don Joaquin thought this out of place. His daughter's silence on the subject had pleased him better.
"I don't know," Mariquita answered, glancing towards her father.
"No," he said; "he has ridden down to Maxwell."
Sometimes one or other of the cowboys would ride down to Maxwell, and reappear, without question or remark.
"I wonder he did not mention he was going," Sarella complained.
"Of course he mentioned it," Don Joaquin said loudly. "He would not go without asking me."
"But to us ladies," Sarella persisted, "it would have been better manners."
"That was not at all necessary," said Don Joaquin; "Mariquita would not expect it."
"I would, though. It ought to have struck him that one might have a communication for him. I should have had commissions for him."
It was evident that Sarella had ruffled Don Joaquin, and it was the first time anyone had seen him annoyed by her.
Next day, after the midday meal, Sarella followed Mariquita out of doors, and said to her, yawning and laughing.
"Don't you miss Mr. Gore?"
Mariquita answered at once and quite simply:
"Miss him? He was never here till a month ago – "
"Nor was I," Sarella interrupted pouting prettily. "But you'd miss me, now."
"Only you're not going away."
"You take it for granted I shall stop, then?" (And Sarella looked complacent.) "That I'm a fixture."
"I never thought of your going away," Mariquita answered, with a formula rather habitual to her. "Where would you go?"
"I should decide on that when I decided to go." Sarella declared oracularly. But Mariquita took it with irritating calmness.
"I don't believe you will decide to go," she said with that gravity and plainness of hers that often irritated Sarella – who liked badinage. "It would be useless."
"Suppose," Sarella suggested, pinching the younger girl's arm playfully, "suppose I were to think of getting married. Shouldn't I have to go then?"
"I never thought of that – " Mariquita was beginning, but Sarella pinched and interrupted her.
"Do you ever think of anything?" she complained sharply.
"Oh, yes, often, of many things."
"What things on earth?" (with sudden inquisitive eagerness.)
"Just my own sort of things," Mariquita answered, without saying whether "her things" were on earth at all. Sarella pouted again.
"You're not very confidential to a person."
Mariquita weighed the accusation. "Perhaps," she said quietly, "I am not much used to persons. Since I came home from the convent there was no other girl here till you came."
"So you're sorry I came!"
"No; glad. I am glad you did that. It is a home for you. And I am sure my father is glad."
"You think he likes my being here?" And Sarella listened attentively for the answer.
"Of course. You must see it."
"You think he does not dislike me? He was cross with me last night."
"He did not like you noticing Mr. Gore was away – "
"Of course I noticed it – surely, he could not be jealous of that!"
"I should not think he could be jealous," Mariquita agreed, too readily to please Sarella. "But I did not think of it. I am sure he does not dislike you. You cannot think he does."
Sarella was far from thinking it. But she had wanted Mariquita to say more, and was only partly satisfied.
"He would not like me to go away?" she suggested.
"Oh, no. The contrary."
"Not even if it were advantageous to me?"
"How advantageous?"
"If I were to be going to a home of my own? Going, for instance, to be married?"
"That would surprise him…"
Sarella was not pleased at this.
"Surprise him! Why should it surprise him that anyone should marry me?"
"There is no reason. Only, he does not imagine that there is someone. If there is someone, he would suppose you had not been willing to marry him by your coming here instead."
("Is she stupid or cautious?" Sarella asked herself. "She will say nothing.")
Mariquita was neither cautious nor stupid. She was only ignorant of Sarella's purpose, and by no means awake to her father's.
"It is terribly hot out here," Sarella grumbled, "and there is such a glare. I shall go in and study."
CHAPTER X
Mariquita did not go in too. She did not find it hot, nor did the glare trouble her. The air was full of life and vigor, and she had no sense of lassitude. There was, indeed, a breeze from the far-off Rockies, and to her it seemed cool enough, though the sun was so nearly directly overhead that her figure cast only a very stunted shadow of herself. In the long grass the breeze made a slight rustle, but there was no other sound.
Mariquita did not want to be indoors; outside, here on the tilted prairie, she was alone and not lonely. The tilt of the vast space around her showed chiefly in this – that eastward the horizon was visibly lower than at the western rim of the prairie. The prairie was not really flat; between her and both horizons there lay undulations, those between her and the western rising into mesas, which, with a haze so light as only to tell in the great distance, hid the distant barrier of the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills even were beyond the frontiers of this State.
She knew well where they were, though, and knew almost exactly beyond which point of the far horizon lay Loretto Heights, beyond Denver, and the Convent.
Somehow the coming of these two new units to the range-life had pushed the Convent farther away still. But Mariquita's thoughts never rested in the mere memories hanging like a slowly fading arras around that long-concluded convent life. What it had given her was more than the memories and was hers still.
As to the mere memories, she knew that with slow but increasing pace they were receding from her, till on time's horizon they would end in a haze, golden but vague and formless. Voices once clearly recalled were losing tone; faces, whose features had once risen before the eye of memory with little less distinctness than that with which she had seen them when physically present, arose now blurred like faces passing a fog. Even their individuality, depending less on feature than expression, was no longer easily recoverable.
She had been used to remember this and that nun by her very footsteps; now the nuns moved, a mere group in one costume, soundlessly, with no footstep at all.
Of this gradual loss of what had been almost her only private possession she made no inward wishful complaint; Mariquita was not morbid, nor melancholy. The operation of a natural law of life could not fill her with the poet's rebellious outcry. To all law indeed she yielded without protest, whether it implied submission without inward revolt to the mere shackles of circumstance, or submission to her father's dominance; for it was not in her fashion of mind to form hypothesis – such hypothesis, for instance, as that of her father calling upon her